If you are a sports fan and aren’t familiar with The Athletic, well, you should be. It is one-stop shopping for the sports fan. There is national coverage of all the primary sports – including Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark on baseball — and localized coverage of most professional teams.

There also will be plenty of University of Maryland coverage led by Patrick Stevens, who I jokingly refer to as a college basketball savant (though Patrick is an all-sports savant, to be fair).

Yes, it is a subscription-only, no-ads site. But we’re not talking a lot of money here. If you use the Baltimore launch link, you can get it for $3.49 per month for the first year – a 30 percent discount. That’s like the cost of a beer (non-fake beer) per month.

BaltimoreBaseball.com will continue to flourish under Rich and Steve Cockey, and that excites me. But if you wanna check my stuff out — including the occasional Connolly’s Tap Room — well, that would be fantastic, too.

Regardless, I wanted to write one last piece letting you know where I’ve gone and to thank everyone again. If this is the end, it’s been a blast.

It’s good to know that free agency extends past the boundaries of the playing field. Good luck Dan, you’ll be missed by all us cheap, old, fat, bald guys sitting at the end of the bar. I followed you from the Sun to BB.com, so I guess I’ll be debating whether or not I want to pay for my fake beers and my favorite O’s writer.

One last question for you: Does this mean you’ll be traveling with the team on a more regular basis?

Dan I have the Athletic and I am so glad that Baltimore is represented. They couldn’t have found two better writers in you and Jeff Zebric. I will miss our discussions , but happy for you. BTW, my wife got me front row seats to see Paul McCartney.

I too became a subscriber to The Athletic a few months ago in the Jayson Stark wave. Then it was decidedly disappointing that there was no Orioles correspondent. So I’m definitely happy that there now is, and that it’s none other than Dan Connolly. At Dan’s announcement on Monday that he was leaving Baltimore Baseball for other environs, I felt that The Athletic would be an obvious and perfect landing spot for him. And to wake up yesterday to find that it was true was certainly a joy!